Finally, the truth is out. The following shocking statement is from Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change.

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution … This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”

Well, now. It looks like Karl Marx, somewhat bedraggled from the thrashing he took by the end of the twentieth-century from the enrichment of the whole free world via free enterprise, has come straggling back onto the field of ideological battle, thermometer in hand, with some tattered temperature charts in his backpack, to inform us through his UN loudhailer, that because the earth may have warmed up a little over the last 100 years – possibly with a little help from anthropogenic causes – Kapitalism must be overthrown.

I have become embroiled in researching a column on climate alarmism and skepticism. Embroiled is the right word. It’s a mess of scientific controversy, academic mugging, and reputation-slurring.

In the process I have become much more skeptical myself as to the claims from all sides (though I am far more skeptical of government-backed “alarmists” such as as found in the UN’s IPCC reports, than of “skeptics” who attack them)

I have been reading passionate books on both the alarmist case , and on the skeptical case.

The best recent alarmist book is by Joseph Romm, Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know. It is very well done and easy to read. You may be able to download the book here:

The skeptical position is well-outlined in a publication by The Heartland Institute. It is also well done and very clear. During the last IPCC conference, Heartland ran an alternative conference down the street for its 700 member-scientists. This ought to indicate a healthy climate of debate, but I fear the two sides are just experiencing a hardening of the attitudes rather than working out their differences.

You can get this important dissenting study on the site below. Just go to the homepage and click “Download” to get a free pdf copy.

For those too busy to read the whole thing, there is a three-page executive summary that will shock most people who have swallowed the alarmist story whole.

In my opinion, the link established here between abortion and the new kind of slavery it engenders is of utmost importance. So, I encourage all readers of this piece to send it to your list of contacts and get the word out. Then, maybe, one day, as a people, we will be able to say: “I once was blind, but now, I see.”

The New York Editor wrote me the day after it was published to say “It landed on President Trump’s desk this morning.”

He is a regular reader of The Epoch Times, so that was fun to imagine he may have actually seen this piece.

Then, yesterday, I got a call from New York. It was a writer for Epoch Times calling to ask my opinion about Trump’s State of the Union address, and what did I think about all the socialism chatter in America these days?

I told him that because America’s Constitution and governmental structure were cobbled together specifically to make big government impossible, they will find themselves faced with a Constitutional crisis of major proportions if they continue in this direction. It would require a lot of Amendments, or a new Constitution entirely to make socialism legitimate in America.

So … I think Trump was right to say “America will never be a socialist country.”

The title of this post is comprised of just two very apt words from an article published last August by Sir Roger Scruton, called “The Art of Taking Offence.” And I am very grateful for them.

It was the physicist Fred Hoyle, I believe – or was it George Orwell? – who once said “Words are like harpoons, once they go in, they are very hard to pull out.”

I hope the words “predatory censorship” will stick in the mind of all who reflect deeply on what has happened to what used to be called “free speech” in the West. Below is the key paragraph from Scruton’s article:

“There are now experts in the art of taking offence, indeed whole academic subjects, such as ‘gender studies’ devoted to it. You may not know in advance what offence consists in – politely opening a door for a member of the opposite sex? Thinking of her sex as ‘opposite’? Thinking in terms of ‘sex’ rather than ‘gender’? Using the wrong pronoun? Who knows. We have encountered a new kind of predatory censorship, a desire to take offence that patrols the world for opportunities without knowing in advance what will best supply its venom. As with the puritans of the seventeenth century, the need to humiliate and to punish precedes any concrete sense of why.”

And these are the key phrases:

“predatory censorship”

“a desire to take offence”

“the need to humiliate and punish”

Let us reflect on what these words are telling us about the thought-police in our midst

Here is a piece from American Thinker that will startle anyone who remembers what “free speech” used to mean.

The best rendering of the underlying principle was articulated in her book Life of Voltaire, by Evelyn Hall (d.1956). This was exactly what Voltaire believed (as do I) but the words are hers:

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Well, there are of course, reasonable limits to free speech, such as to shouting “Fire” in a crowded theater.

The gentleman in this piece, Bill Whatcott, never shouted “Fire” anywhere. He has just voiced reasonable, and largely fact-based objections to the radical nature of contemporary social and moral policies, and has argued that they offend traditional moral principles

I have done so, too. All my writing life. I don’t know why I have not ever been charged. A Canadian newspaper once tried to have some my statements against the normalization of homosexuality, abortion, and euthanasia (and a few other things) in The War Against The Family (1993) sent to a so-called Human Rights Tribunal.

I wrote to the newspaper that they might have a more interesting time suing prestigious professional journals such as Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Society) from which all the facts I quoted were taken.

I am part of a freethinker group that debates all sorts of topics by email. Recently, I got into it, as they say, with R and H, who both (thus far) support a woman’s “right” to abortion and they ground this supposed right in the simple fact of her “choice”, which is the virtue-signalling mantra of all modern progressives.

*********

My response to these two gentlemen began when R objected to my phrase “pity party” which I used to describe his worry that a pregnant single mom should not be required to endure a life of raising her child all by herself. Unfair, he argued, and if we are compassionate we should allow her to abort.

I replied: I didn’t mean to sound quite so sarcastic. I was a little worked up. But I did mean to take aim at what looked to me like selective compassion for the mother, over compassion for the unborn child she is about to kill.

Then, I continued, you said: “when has any emotion ever not been selective?” Wow. If you are really arguing that all compassion is selective, then you must also be saying that no compassion has any genuineobject of compassion. If all compassion is relative, then object is simply decided by the person feeling the compassion. Is this what you are arguing? If so, this converts compassion into an arbitrary feeling, and hence a kind of mockery of real compassion, doesn’t it?

Then, you argued that compassion should be extended only to the “extant human being,” but not to what you call “the developing human tissue” in her body.

I am a little astonished that someone with your knowledge of physiology makes such a statement because the unborn child is genetically, and in terms of the complete DNA info needed for maturation, a fully-formed extant human being that is obviously going to mature to full size. It is not just “developing human tissue,” like, say, a piece of skin, or a piece of a fingernail.

I mean, think about the fact that we now know (as we didn’t not so long ago) that the baby’s heart starts beating around 21 days of gestation – three weeks. Almost 100% of all abortions everywhere in the world, take place after that point. A piece of “tissue” does not have a beating heart. And in a slogan that helped convert me many moons ago from a man who didn’t care, to one who cares very much about this issue: “Abortion stops a beating heart.”

Some other objections:

* Contrary to what you said, Canadian law is completely silent on abortion. We have no law. No law whatsoever. Parliament declined to create a new law after the last law got struck down by Parliament in 1988, in R. vs Morgentaler.

* There is no 20 week rule or limit for abortion in Canada, as you have assumed. Canada has publicly-funded (and other docs have privately performed) hundreds of thousands of post 20-week abortions over the last forty years, including a smaller but quite significant number of late-term abortions (in the third trimester, after 24 weeks).

Same in the USA, but there, in the millions over forty years. Some of these unborn children are in the two to five pound range, and even much larger. Professor Ian Gentles, a world expert on this topic from Toronto, can fill you in on the actual numbers.

We simply don’t know how many partial-birth abortions have been performed in Canada (of children too big to pass the unripe cervix and birth canal intact, and so they are extracted feet-first, the skull collapsed by sucking out the child’s brains when all but the head is out – to make the skull smaller so that it can exit more easily. In some US cases of admitted partial-birth abortions, abortionists speak of “disarticulating the neck” (breaking its neck to ensure the baby is dead) before pulling the last of the baby out of the birth canal.

Doctors suck brains out, or disarticulate baby-necks to avoid the charge of delivering and then letting-die a live baby, and then getting charged with murder. It is a way of killing the child before it has “passed completely from the birth canal” (the wording in the Canadian Criminal Code that defines a “human being”) so as to avoid admitting they killed it.

In short, if the child is just a thing still in the womb, then it cannot be murdered. Because – to reference my earlier argument about slavery – the child has already been converted by law from a human into a thing, and is therefore legally the slave-property of its own mother. And, just as many slave jurisdictions in history refused to charge whites with murder for killing a slave, we refuse to charge abortionists with murder when obviously killing a child still alive and (partially) in the womb.

With the position you have supported, and even though you previously knew nothing about it, wouldn’t you and H logically also have to support this gruesome partial-birth procedure? And if not, why not? You both will likely try to argue that you could not support such a horrible thing because of your compassion. But you argued previously that compassion is just an emotion relative to the person feeling it, and not necessarily justified by any objective circumstance. So, you don’t get to first base.

I think you should come into the open now. You have admitted your “understanding” re the abortion regime we have been operating in Canada (and massively in the USA) is – how should I put this? – not fully-informed.

And H, as a black man, I have a question for you. And the rest of us would like to hear your answer. Black mothers mostly from poor parts of the USA, at 6% of the US population, account for 38% of all US abortions. How do you react to this fact? Hard to believe you will not call it a genocide vs. blacks.

But then … if you support “a woman’s right to abortion,” as you have said, what’s wrong with what even many objecting blacks call “fetal genocide” against the black race?” I am guessing you are either forced to accept this reality by your own logic, or, will be forced to say you are against only racial abortions.

If so, that means you will have to argue for affirmative action in abortion, and push for “abortion quotas,” so that blacks, whites, hispanics, etc, are aborted (killed in the womb), according to their % of the population, that % to be adjusted annually to account for population shifts. I am not joking, this will have to be where such thinking takes us if the charge of selectively aborting blacks and the poor is to be countered. Oh, my goodness …

So both R and H: I would love your answers to my question: Do you support all abortion, even up until the moment of natural birth as justified only by compassion and a woman’s choice? After all, that is the law and a woman’s “right” in Canada.

Incidentally, folks, and your response to this would be of interest as well – CIHI. the Canadian Insittute for Health Information has recently published information that between 2013 and 2018, there were 766 “botched” late-term abortions in Canada (not counting Quebec, where reliable separate numbers show 218 “accidental live births” between 2000, and 2012).

The numbers on these babies:

By age of gestation: 8 babies at 29 weeks and older; 27 babies at 25 to 28 weeks; 557 babies at 21 to 24 weeks; 141 babies at 17 to 20 weeks.

These are situations where late-term abortions were attempted, but … the children were “born alive” (did not die from the injection of acid or saline solution into the womb prior to extraction). The authors of the CIHI report actually called for “feticide” injections directly into the womb, n future, to more certainly kill the babies before the extraction is attempted, thus to reduce the moral and legal embarrassment of these “accidental live births.”

Now this ought to be an explosive bit of information that challenges all our moral/legal presumptions surrounding abortion. Why? because the mother’s intent was to kill her baby, which she legally can do in her own womb. But the intent failed, and the babies were born alive. So they “magically” as the video below so trenchantly puts it, became human beings. Check it out:

Once these aborted babies magically became human beings, the full panoply of the resources of the medical system should have been brought to bear save the lives of those children, should it not, as they would have done for any other human being found alive on a hospital bed?

But this was not to be. We currently have only anecdotal info that everywhere these children, although now full human beings, are simply”left to die.” We don’t know how long that takes, what suffering they endure, or whether anyone has bothered to call the police and report what by our own law is defined as murder.

Here is a rather funny take on the Christmas story composed by my colleague, Professor Harley Price.

Harley teaches classes in the School of Continuing Education at the University of Toronto in all sorts of wonderful subjects from classic Greek and Roman literature and Christian theology, to Homer, Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare, and much more. If you are within striking distance of Toronto, a course from Harley is a very rich experience indeed.

Here is his “progressive’s” analysis of the Christmas story.

It is a good laugh, and would be a great laugh it it weren’t that so much of it is already festering in the progressive mind..

This is a letter of flagrant self-promotion to say that my latest book, Disruptive Essays, has just been released, and is available on websites such as Amazon and Chapters. You can see it on the Home page of this website, and in my “Books section, where you can click to purchase easily. On the cover, I warn: “There Are No Safe Spaces In This Book!”

Word is that university students in residence at our temples of political correctness are buying the book in droves and hiding it under their mattresses for secret reading at night!

Since I first posted this message, the book has been selling well. So thanks to all who have already purchased it.

These essays were assembled because many people have told me over the years they would like to read some of my work, but don’t know which book to start with. So I decided to prepare this one as a “Reader”, which is to say, as a collection of essays drawn from all my books, from journal articles I have published but which most readers will not have seen unless they are subscribers to those journals, and from previously unpublished work.

It feels awkward to urge people to buy my books. But this is the holiday season, and over the years I have found that most people are thankful for the suggestion. They so often have said: “Oh Great idea! My Dad [or my spouse, my brother, my daughter] would love a book like that for Christmas.”

So … if you want to change minds, to change the country, or just want to please (or challenge) someone you know ? Please consider clicking one of the links below, and that part of your shopping will be done!

Below the links, is the Table of Contents, so you can see what’s in the book. Better be sitting down!